Swiss patent application No. 01508/06 describes a new printed product and a new production method and a new system for producing printed products which develop web logs and the blog articles they contain as a news source for conventional printed media. The attractiveness of blog articles in conventional printed media, particularly of topical blog articles in daily newspapers, is described in more detail in the aforementioned application, and reference is made to the full content of the statements therein in respect of details. Thus, blog articles may appeal to a new class of reader as an addition to or substitute for agency communications and correspondent reports in printed media, or may meet previously unmet information requirements in existing readers or even arouse them for the first time. The aforementioned application proposes producing a non-individualized printed product with a high circulation as inexpensively as possible.
The present application is now intended to use the advantages of blog articles in the printed product in order to produce a partly individualized printed product.
The subject of individualized printed products has concerned the printing industry for decades. A wide variety of technical solutions have been proposed from simply printing an address on a newspaper through to printing newspaper which is fully individual for a reader. The desired individualization then appears to be positively correlated to costs, which means that in all known methods and apparatuses, not a single one of which has been able to establish itself on the market, at least as far as dailies and weeklies are concerned, the price of the product inevitably rises as the degree of individualization increases.
When competing with other newspapers and particularly electronic media, there is also an increasing pressure for the conventional printed media, in this case again particularly the dailies, to be topical. The use of high-capacity systems, which can currently produce up to 80,000 products an hour, not only allows production costs to be kept down but also allows for the copy deadline to be pushed further back, since production requires less time. The reader expects “last-minute” events from the evening to be reported in the newspaper the next day. There is thus an even greater pressure for the desired individualization to be topical.
The cost problem as a result of the desired individualization has been known for a long time, and hence EP0805756 from the applicant, for example, describes a method whose basic idea is to systematically use the greatest possible degree of flexibility by virtue of digital printing. Since the digital printing methods actually involve “formes” being perpetually created afresh, the flexibility of such methods is orders of magnitude greater than the flexibility of printing methods which use real formes. The term “digital printing” in EP0805756, as in the present application too, refers to all printing methods in which solid formes are not printed onto the paper but rather a “writing means” is digitally actuated such that, with continual alteration as appropriate, it writes the prescribed samples onto the paper. Examples of the best known of these methods are laser and inkjet methods and various thermal methods. In the present invention, forme-bound printing methods, unless expressly mentioned, are referred to across the board as “conventional printing”. For the present application, conventional printing is also intended to be understood to mean high-capacity printing, in particular, in which, today, quantities achieved are 80,000 printed products per hour and more.
In the method proposed in EP0805756, the material which is printed and the further processing of the printed material to produce finished printed products are systematically matched to this high flexibility. In this case, a digital printing method is used to print all the printed pages of a printed product onto the front and back of a more or less continuous paper web. For printing, the paper web is guided essentially continuously through an appropriate printing apparatus and is printed in the form of at least one respective row of adjacent printed pages on both sides. The paper web is folded, prior to or after printing, between the pages of the rows of printed pages to be printed or already printed to form a folded stack and is disjointed transversely with respect to its longitudinal direction or at least put into an easy-to-separate state (e.g. perforation or partial disjointing). This produces a sequence of fan-folded (fan-fold) printed products whose first and last pages may possibly still be connected to one another but are simple to separate. EP0805756 already discloses the practice of distributing such printed products to the reader in fan-folded form directly or of processing them further to produce a wide variety of inherently known forms of printed products. Despite the advantageous proposals for a solution, the costs of producing such an individualized printed product are in the same measure, particularly when using colour printing, far above the costs of a product produced conventionally using the high-capacity process. The cost problem is thus not solved satisfactorily.
In the printed specification for EP0805756, the loss of efficiency and the attendant cost increases already address two problems which are entailed by the desired individualization of printed products such as newspapers and periodicals. This patent specification also discusses approaches to organizing the desired smaller editions and the increased individualization of copies in appropriate fashion in the further processing of the printed products and to designing, controlling and coupling particularly the further-processing apparatus in appropriate fashion in order to increase flexibility and to make it possible to produce individualized products to a greater degree without altering the printing method per se. It is proposed that newspapers or periodicals which have been printed as a uniform edition per se be individualized and made ready for dispatch by virtue of the following further-processing steps: insertion of inserts, compiled according to the addressee, which, at least in part, can also be printed on an addressee-specific basis by a printer which is provided specifically for this purpose (e.g. reply cards provided with an individual sender's address), additional individual printing on insides or outsides (e.g. individual addressing), packaging individually or in assembled packages according to addresses, for which assembled packages a further printer is used to produce address sheets and delivery notes, for example. It is also proposed that the individualized periodicals be compiled in a sequence which is correct for the postal route and be packaged into assembled packages. However, EP0805756 already recognizes that the software and control-engineering sophistication for such methods is quite obviously considerable, and accordingly an extremely simple production method is proposed for fan-folded products which is very well suited to decentralized production. Preferably, this involves digital print data being supplied by a wide variety of sources to a wide variety of production locations on demand, for example via the telephone network.
Despite this possible decentralization, this method for producing individualized printed products, like many other methods of the same kind, has not been able to establish itself on the market to date.
In the case of the known solutions, the desired individualization within the context of the conventional high-capacity printing results in complex systems whose complexity makes them more susceptible to errors and/or means that they require sophisticated superordinate control systems which are inclined to failures and associated system stoppages.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide a method and a system for producing printed products of the cited kind which avoid the drawbacks described above.
It is also the object of the invention to use known high-capacity methods and systems in order to produce an inexpensive printed product which permits a selectable degree of individuality and high level of topicality. This object is intended to be achieved for a wide variety of kinds of printed products, for example including for extensive assembled and/or stapled printed products with blog articles.
It is also an object of the invention to provide a method and a system which allow forme-bound high-capacity printing processes and non-forme-bound printing processes to be integrated when producing a partly individualized printed product, particularly for creating a product with blog articles.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a method and a system which allows correct addressing and particularly a correct sequence for the products which are to be addressed and those addressed, and hence allows the subsequent delivery, easily and inexpensively, with relatively high efficiency without any increased machine sophistication.
This object is achieved by the features contained in the characterizing part of Claims 1, 15 and 16.
The method according to the invention involves printed products, which have preferably been produced in a conventional high-capacity printing method, for example forme-bound using rotary printing, being provided with an identification means (IM) in the rotary section or between rotary section and a first further-processing apparatus connected downstream of the rotary section. The identification means carries the information for identifying the products and renders them identifiable. This rendering identifiable preferably occurs at a level which allows every single printed product to be identified, and will subsequently be referred to as individual rendering identifiable (indification). In contrast, it is also possible to provide groups of products with an IM with identical identification information, which in the context of this application will be called omnification. In line with a first preferred embodiment of the invention, the identification means has an associated ID tag which, in the printed state, is preferably implemented as a machine-readable two-dimensional or matrix barcode. Basic information relating to different types of barcodes is known and available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar code, for example, and will not be repeated again here. Using two-dimensional barcodes, such as the Data Matrix Code, it is currently possible—depending on the size of the tag—to store up to 2 kilobytes of data and show them in printed form. The code is either fitted directly onto the printed product or onto an adhesive label which is to be fitted to the printed product using a digital printing method, or alternatively it is possible for the identification means (IM) also to be implemented as electronically readable or read/writable electronic memories, preferably as tags in the form of RFID tags. Combinations of the aforementioned identification means (IM) are likewise possible. Thus, it is possible to stick RFID tags printed with a visually ascertainable matrix code fitted on the visible side onto the products according to requirements, for example.
In line with a further preferred embodiment of the present invention, the identification means (IM) is not fitted directly on or to the printed product but rather has a resolvable, temporary direct physical association with the printed product. In this case, the identification means may be in the form of read/writable electronic memories, for example, preferably in the form of RFID tags in a transport unit associated with the printed product, for example a pocket on an insertion apparatus and/or a grab on a grab transporter.
In line with a further preferred embodiment, the identification means is associated with the printed product no longer in a physical association but rather in a superordinate control device which detects the position of each product in the production process in relation to the handling stations used in the process and simultaneously associates the product-specific identification means preferably in the form of an electronic identification code in the control device.
In preferred embodiments in which the printed products are provided directly with the identification means (IM), the IM comprises at least one identification (ID) tag, which is in turn compiled from a number of single-bit codes and at least one multibit code. It has been found to be advantageous to fit the ID tags onto the printed product directly in or immediately downstream of the rotary section on the interface for further processing, at any rate upstream of the first downstream handling station, using a digital printer. Preferably, it is the main products which are indificated in this way.
In the case of printed products assembled with some complexity which comprise a main product and a plurality of first-order subproducts and/or advertising inserts, for example, which themselves in turn contain inserted (second-order) subproducts, the first-order subproducts are preferably also provided with an IM. For the sake of simplicity, however, the basic idea of the invention will be explained below first using the example of indification of a main product in a daily newspaper. Onto every main product, an ID tag is printed in the marginal area using a digital printing unit (e.g. an inkjet printer), for example, in or after the rotary section. The ID tag is preferably positioned in the marginal area of the front page, and is not cut away in the event of any marginal bleed. In the simplest case, it comprises a multibit code, which may be an individual or group-associated product number, for example. Preferably, the ID tag comprises one or more pieces of control information for downstream processing units, however, which are in turn respectively in the form of 1-bit codes in the simplest case. When the present application refers to an ID tag, this is not intended to mean that the ID tag is printed as a three-dimensional unit. It is entirely possible for portions of the ID tag, which forms a functional unit, to be positioned at different points on a front page if this improves legibility or simplifies later reading.
The information contained in the ID tag comes from a superordinate control system and is supplied to the digital printing unit online or via a locally readable storage medium and is preferably buffer-stored in the digital printing unit.
As already mentioned previously, the present invention is preferably used for producing printed products individualized on an addressee-specific basis. In line with one preferred embodiment, these are printed products such as newspapers and periodicals which comprise blog articles compiled individually for the addressee, for example in the form of a blog insert as an inserted product. The addressee, that is to say the subscriber to the newspaper or periodical, receives a blog insert compiled individually for him. The methods and criteria for selecting the articles for the blog insert are essentially known to a person skilled in the art from the field of individual electronic periodicals, also known by the buzzword “Daily Me”. The subscriber has the option of compiling the articles for himself on the basis of his guidelines. Preferably, this is done using online access to a user portal. A user profile is generated and stored which is the basis for preferably automated selection of blog articles for the addressee-specific blog insert to be created. The options for producing an individual electronic newspaper are described by way of example in the publication “Chancen und Risiken einer individuellen Informationsvermittlung” [Opportunities and risks of individual communication of information] by R. Specker from 1997. Within the context of the present invention, the term blog articles in the wider sense also includes advertisements and editorial articles and also graphical material which is compiled in a preliminary printing stage in the layout process for one or more pages.
A person skilled in the art is aware that printed products which are compiled individually for a known addressee provide extremely attractive and lucrative advertising opportunities. The technical aspects for the implementation and use of these advertising opportunities will therefore not be discussed in any depth below.
As already mentioned previously, the blog articles are preferably added to the conventionally produced printed product indificated previously in the form of a digitally printed blog insert. As will be explained below, the indification of the conventionally produced product allows the correct addressing and the correct association of the addressee-specific blog insert, these two method steps also being able to be performed in the converse order.
Usually, only a certain proportion of a printed product's edition, for example the daily edition of a daily newspaper, is delivered to the readers by mail using an address. A large portion of the daily edition is sold anonymously, for example at kiosks, and a further portion is delivered via contracts to subscribers in certain regions. Partial individualization of the printed product is appropriate only for directly addressed newspapers and newspapers delivered to known subscribers. Kiosk sales, on the other hand, account for nonindividualized standard products. The invention thus provides the option of integrating the production of nonindividualized standard products and of partially individualized printed products in one process. In doing this, the present invention allows not only individual addressing of a newspaper and the addition or attachment of blog articles compiled on an addressee-specific basis, but it also allows the addressee-specific or at least region-specific assembly of a selection of subproducts to form an addressee-specific or region-specific end product.
A further extremely advantageous aspect of the present invention has been found to be the introduction of control instructions for possible handling steps, connected downstream of the conventional printing process, or handling units, such as supply stations, into the identification means, preferably into the ID tag. In the simplest case, the control instruction regarding whether a particular feeder is intended to insert a subproduct into a main product can be read off directly from the main product by a suitable optical sensor connected upstream of the feeder. The present invention therefore affords an extremely simple interface which allows workstations, as from third-party providers, to be integrated into an existing production system. In the case of the optically readable ID tags, for example in the form of a barcode, the workstation to be integrated does not need to be connected to a superordinate system and actuated, for the product to be handled, with a control instruction, but rather it can operate autonomously, since the respective product provides the instruction for execution or omission of the work step itself.
The identification means (IM), which the inventive method involves associating with every main product or subproduct directly after forme-bound production, therefore contains information which operatively connects the relevant digital printing station, or another apparatus for generating the information to be stored in the identification means (IM), to the product such that it is functionally connected thereto at least during the production process. In the example which has already been mentioned several times, the information contained in a printed-on ID tag is a product identifier which differs individually for each product, previously referred to, contained and readable as an indification. If an installation produces 100,000 copies of an edition of the example newspaper, accordingly 100,000 individual product identifiers are generated and printed on. The product identifiers preferably already have an associated piece of information relating to the addressee, or said information is even contained in readable form in the product identifier. Alternatively, this association can be made at a later time downstream in the production process. In the former case, by way of example, the individual product identifier, which is already associated with a subscriber, preferably has addressee-specific control information associated with it and integrated accordingly into the ID tag during the actual indification. By way of example, this addressee-specific control information comprises the instruction to a downstream feeder to insert a subproduct into the addressee-specific main product. If, by way of example, subscriber Sample has ordered subproducts from the areas of motoring, economy and sport as part of his subscription, the printed-on ID tag will comprise the relevant positive control codes for precisely these three subproducts, and the addressee-specific “Sample” product will control the feeders for the subproducts from the areas of motoring, economy and sport as it passes through the production path such that they respectively insert one subproduct. By contrast, all other feeders will not be activated, which means that the “Sample” product produced comprises only the subproducts required by Mr Sample. Accordingly, it is also possible to make a negative selection, which means that Mrs Meier can order a newspaper without a motoring or sports section, or without a subproduct from the areas of motoring and sport. On the basis of this customer order, which is stored in the customer database of the superordinate control system, negative control codes for precisely these three subproducts are printed on during indification, that is to say when the “Meier” ID tag is fitted. If there are seven subject-specific subproducts in the unaltered standard product, for example, Mr Sample would receive only his three required subproducts—motoring, economy and sport—besides the main product, while the system based on the invention assembles the main product with the remaining four subject-specific subproducts for Mrs Meier.
Assembly controlled in line with the invention can advantageously be accomplished by means of an apparatus for gathering in the broad sense. Gathering in the broad sense is intended to be understood to mean both gathering in the narrower sense and insertion and assembly. To produce such printed products using high-capacity methods, gathering, insertion and assembly drums or corresponding sections for gathering, insertion and/or assembly are known, for example from Ferag AG. In this case, gathering involves saddle-shaped supports, and insertion and assembly involve V-shaped compartments, being continuously routed past a plurality of addition stations, and each supply device usually adds a further component, for example a further sheet or a further subproduct, to the product which is produced. Gathering starts with an innermost folded sheet, insertion starts with an outermost, folded sheet or main product, and assembly starts with a first usually unfolded component. A person skilled in the art is aware that gathering, insertion and assembly methods can be combined as appropriate. The known high-capacity devices are currently able to achieve capacities of 40,000 to over approximately 80,000 products per hour. The conveying path for the printed products between two feeders or other handling stations preferably comprises, for example in insertion drums from Ferag AG, a respective region of cross-feed, in which it is preferably possible to mount a sensor, for example in the form of a barcode reader, past which the product to be handled is moved and read at a suitable speed when travelling on the production path. In the case of gathering apparatuses, such as the saddle-stitching drums from Ferag AG, as are known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,324,014, for example, the sensor is preferably arranged in a saddle-shaped support in the region of cross-feed between two supply stations. The sensors may also be arranged at a distance from the apparatus for gathering, insertion or assembly, as is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,613,669 (Ferag AG). In the case of gathering in the narrower sense, it has been found appropriate to put the product identifier on an inner side of the prefold in each case, for example. For handling in insertion drums, this should accordingly be on an outer side. For a person skilled in the art, the terms main product and subproduct have a clear meaning in connection with the aforementioned types of assembly, gathering and insertion, and he knows the respective relative position of the products with respect to one another, their orientation in the production process and the chronology of their supply.
A crucial advantage of the invention is that the addressee-specific assembly is controlled only by the information contained in the ID tag, without any direct control instruction from a superordinate control system. This not only relieves the load on the superordinate controller to an enormous extent but also makes the method much more robust, since even in the event of total failure of the superordinate controller the already indificated products are assembled correctly. To make the system even more stable, all the information required for generating the ID tags for an entire edition is stored in the relevant unit, for example in the digital printer in the rotary section, so that it is available locally and independently of the superordinate controller.
Both example products can then be individualized still further on an addressee-specific basis in line with customer requirements. For example, an addressee-specific blog insert relating to the special subject Champions League and instances of corruption in professional football can be enclosed with the “Sample” product, and the “Meier” product is provided with a blog insert relating to the subjects of environmental scandals in China and the suppression of linguistic minorities in the former Soviet Union. Whereas, in the case of product individualization by means of addressee-specific assembly, the selection of subjects is limited to the ready-made, conventionally produced subproducts, the selection of subjects for compiling the blog insert is almost unlimited. The preselection for the blog subjects is, as already mentioned, made by the subscriber, preferably using an online portal, and, like the selection of the subproducts, can also be changed as often as desired, even from issue to issue, and stored as appropriate in the addressee-specific subscriber profile.
In addition to the individualization which is performed on behalf or at the request of the addressee/subscriber, the present invention provides the option of taking the addressee-specific subscriber profiles, or the selection of the subproducts and/or the blog subjects, as a basis for providing the end product to be produced with addressee-specific advertising. This can be done in the area of assembly for example by inserting target-group-specific high-quality conventionally produced advertising inserts, sticking in exactly the same postcards, vouchers or product samples and, in the case of digitally printed inserts such as the blog insert, by integrating addressee-specific advertisements into the insert layout. A person skilled in the art can see the enormous potential for target-group-oriented advertisement, through to fully individualized advertisement, which is provided by the system according to the invention, particularly also by the integration of forme-bound high-capacity printing processes and non-forme-bound printing processes in the production of a partly individualized printed product, and is capable, without any inventive involvement, of exploiting this potential by virtue of need-based adjustments for the specific individual case.
The fact that the method according to the invention is used to produce inventive, partly individualized products integrated with non-individualized standard products in a preferably serial or partially parallel production path means that it is also possible to provide new solutions to problems in addressing with missing or incorrectly assembled partly individualized products, and since the direct or indirect identification of the products as proposed by us. During indification of the main products, the non-individualized standard products and the partly individualized products are preferably put into an order which ensures that, towards the end of the production path, prior to the addressing, there are respective mini clusters of a respectively partly individualized product and one or more non-individualized standard products. Should an error occur during the addressing, or should a product partly individualized on an addressee-specific basis be missing, the or one of the immediately subsequently non-individualized standard products can be addressed as a replacement.
To prevent negative customer reactions, a further embodiment of the invention provides for the addressee to be informed that he is receiving not his subscribed partly individualized product but rather a non-individualized standard product. The subscriber can be informed by means of an additional block of text, preferably created together with the addressing using digital printing, or by means of the downstream affixing of an appropriate note. This can be accomplished very elegantly using an apparatus, as known from EP1106550, EP1086914 and EP1275607 from Ferag AG and established extremely successfully on the market under the trademark MEMOSTICK®. To increase customer loyalty still further, the MEMOSTICK® note with the information about the wrong product may additionally comprise a voucher for a free purchase of another printed product from the respective publishing house.
To implement the inventive systems with the identification means (IM) described previously as electronically readable or read/writable tags, sensors in the form of known electronic writers or read/writers are used which are suitable for contactless data transfer and change of identification. These system elements are also generic interfaces which simplify the integration of workstations or system components from third-party providers.